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Signs point to PMO in NAFTA leak

Fingers are pointing at Conservatives close to Stephen Harper for leaking a diplomatic memo that badly embarrassed Barack Obama and put Canada's vital cross-border interests at risk. Multiple sources say the Canadian note questioning the Democrat frontrunner's public promise to reopen NAFTA was leaked from the Prime Minister's Office to a Republican contact before it made American headline news.

By James TraversNational Affairs Columnist

Tues., May 27, 2008

OTTAWA–Fingers are pointing at Conservatives close to Stephen Harper for leaking a diplomatic memo that badly embarrassed Barack Obama and put Canada's vital cross-border interests at risk. Multiple sources say the Canadian note questioning the Democrat frontrunner's public promise to reopen NAFTA was leaked from the Prime Minister's Office to a Republican contact before it made American headline news.

Their claims come days after an internal probe threw up its hands at finding the source. Contradicting Friday's inconclusive report, they claim the controversial memo was slipped to the son of Wisconsin Republican Congressman James Sensenbrenner. Frank Sensenbrenner is well connected to Harper's inner circle and, at Ottawa's insistence, was briefly on contract with Canada's Washington embassy to work on congressional relations.

Contacted yesterday morning, Frank Sensenbrenner did not seem surprised and agreed to an afternoon interview. But he did not call at the agreed time and did not respond to repeated emails.

A determined reader will find many of the dots – but not the conclusion – in the probe report strategically released on the cusp of a spring weekend. It confirms a few U.S. citizens could have been in contact with government officials who had the report, but finds no evidence of irregularities. Instead, the report makes a distracting fuss about clearing Ian Brodie, the Prime Minister's chief of staff, and Michael Wilson, Canada's ambassador in Washington, of revealing classified information that never carried that secretive label.

What the report conspicuously avoids is following the suspicious trail from the PMO to America's dominant newswire service, the Associated Press, through a Republican conduit. Instead of fulfilling Harper's pledge to trace the source, the report by Kevin Lynch, Canada's top civil servant and Harper's deputy minister, blames bureaucrats for circulating the memo too widely and failing to identify the information as classified

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That badly misses the point and obscures the motive. Identifying the information as more sensitive would not have stopped the leak as long as Conservatives in high places were willing to help soulmate Republicans by rolling the dice on Canada's most important relationship. Getting the diplomatic memo to the U.S. media was pivotal in amplifying a small Canadian story into big American political news. The interpretation by Canadian diplomats that Obama was speaking out of both sides of his mouth on free trade is widely believed to have damaged his prospects in the Ohio primary and distracted Democrats to Republican advantage.

"This was a very deliberate piece of business for political purpose," one of the sources said. "It puts political ideology ahead of what's good for the country."

Now that Obama is the presumptive Democrat candidate, concern is again rising in Ottawa that Canada-U.S. relations will be strained if he wins the presidency in November. That risk was not as great – but should still have been self-evident – in March, when Brodie's loose and ultimately inaccurate remarks alerted reporters that a U.S. campaign had allegedly told Canadian diplomats not to worry too much about NAFTA being reopened.

Even then the controversy might well have been short-lived and mostly contained to Canada if the Associated Press had not been faxed what the Lynch report confirms was an essentially complete copy of the memo. Among the few significant changes discovered by investigators but not reported was a determined effort to obscure the source and timing of the fax.

The PMO was not on the original foreign affairs distribution list. An analyst in Lynch's office gave the memo to a PMO official on Feb. 27 who then shared it with a colleague. A day later it was passed to Brodie. There is no evidence Brodie forwarded the memo himself, but by noon March 2 AP was in touch with the embassy seeking clarification.

In another tactical leak, word that Brodie plans to leave his post this summer trickled out last week, a day before the Lynch report. As Conservatives apparently intended, that sucked much of the steam out of the issue and distracted attention from an investigation that is as unsatisfying as a whodunit that never reveals who did it.

In failing to plumb the leak, the report effectively protects the ruling party from awkward questions. With an election not far in the future, voters might reasonably ask if Conservatives put this country's seminal relationship at risk to give Republicans a helping hand.

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